Projection technology

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I don't know much about this topic, but I think I know what I like, and I know that there's a lot of controversy on this topic. At any rate, I think that the local English language theatre is using crappy digital video projection -- but how can I be sure? And should I just get used to it, or is there a winnable war going on here?

I didn't think any theaters outside of some of the major, luxe ones were equipped for digital projection yet. I think perhaps what you're noticing is stuff having gone through some digital processing or even a digital transfer before being struck to 35mm. That or just old-fashioned bad projection, which I've come to accept as standard practice at most theaters.

I see pixels (big fat ones) and too little light. I've also seen a couple of weird things: twice, a film was shown in English from what was clearly a dubbed "print" (because the subtitle "later that day" was shown in German) and once the wrong film was started up and they were able to switch to the proper one so quickly that I suspected that the changing of a disk rather than a reel was involved. Or am I just paranoid?

9 of 10 commercial theater projectors use 3 x DLP chips, which have a pretty good fill factor (95%), but that 5% comprises a black margin around every pixel. This could be solved with a slight defocusing, so that bleed from pixels effectively covers gaps between pixels.

Some theaters are still running older 2K projectors (2048×1080) (the 4Ks are ~$100k investments), which have no more resolution than the monitor I'm typing at, and less than current TVs. Sit too close, with a "perfectly" focused projector and pixels will be visible.